Archive for the ‘Geothermal’ Category

I’ve been a big fan of EGS for some time now and am continually frustrated by the lack of support and interest it gets. EGS can provide large amounts of baseload energy without creating much of an environmental impact or creating much surface level disturbance. Moreover, hot dry rock exists everywhere (albeit at varying depths). Despite these obvious benefits, to date EGS has gotten no love from the government, which prefers to piss our money away on aimless fuel cell reserach. The “technology” behind EGS is essentially ready to go. All we need is the government to invest in deployment R&D and co-sponsor a few large scale demonstration projects. The fantastic MIT EGS Report estimates that a modest investment of $300 million over the next 10 years could lead to EGS contributing 10% of baseload electricity by 2050. According to Romm we waste spend that amount on hydrogen fuel cell research every year.

2. Marylanders and other interested folk should also check out video of Governor Martin O’malley’s keynote address to the Maryland Association of Counties last week. The topic is “Securing Maryland’s Energy Future”.

3. I recently discovered GreentechMedia, which is a really great source of clean energy happenings. However, the site’s blog leaves a bit to be desired. The first post I clicked on was a long winded rant about RGGI design shortcomings which basically amounted to a complaint that the caps aren’t strict enough. My favorite part was where the author claims that the decision to denominate permits in short tons rather than metric tons was a “market design flaw”. As Evan put it, “This is especially a problem for traders that can’t multiply by 0.907″. Ha.

4. Finally, in political news, John McCain either doesn’t know what the word “invade” means or doesn’t know that we’re already living in the 21st century.